When a user clicks on your website and finds the website is taking more than a few seconds to load, they will likely leave your page. Speed not only affects the experience it also has an impact on SEO. Luckily we have the answer to remedy this. We will look what are the things that are slowing down your website. As well as how to speed up your WordPress website.
How to Test Your WordPress Website Speed
Since it is difficult to know the problem areas, we will use some free tools to help. Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrixs are the top choices to use. When you use these free tools it will give us field data. Field data includes many ways that can affect your website speed.
It is important to keep in mind that a perfect score is not required to make it to the top of Google. When you are not a website coder it is nearly impossible to get one. Plugins we use to help us design websites can slow down your site. Remember to try to keep the number of plugins down. If it is one that you don’t absolutely need remove it.
We also want to look at how is our WordPress website speed looks to people who are visiting for the first time. When we type in the same website over and over again our browser uses cache and cookies to create less of a delay when browsing the web. How do we see our WordPress website like this? Open an incognito or private window. An incognito or private window will remove any cache or cookies to appear like it is the first time on your website.
8 Ways to Boost Your Speed
- Enable Compression. Using plugins such as GZip to make your files that are larger then 150 bytes. Do not use this on images.
- Minify JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. When you optimize your code you will improve your speed by a lot. This includes removing removing spaces, commas, and extra code.
- Reduce Redirects. Each time a site is sent to a different page this takes more time waiting for the HTTP to complete.
- Remove Render-Blocking JavaScript. Before a browser can deliver the website it needs to build a DOM tree to translate the HTML code.
- Take Advantage of Browser Caching. Browser cache stores a lot of information so when a visitor comes back to your site, it does not need to reload the page. Check out this article on the top plug-ins for browser caching. If you are using SiteGround SG Optimizer would be the best tool. Watch our video below on how to set it up
- Improve Server Response Time. Server response time is the time between when a visitor clicks on link or enters your website to the time it takes the server to respond. When you have a good server response time your website load quickly. Without it the page can take to long which can result in traffic leaving your site which will effect your SEO. To help with a good response you want to remove any plug-ins that are not needed. Also looking at Switch Your Website Host. When you switch your website provider you can quickly speed up your site depending on your current one. Check out which rank the highest response time with speed.
- Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN). A CDN is a group of servers located all over world works together to give a fast speed for your website.
- Optimize Images
How to Optimize Images
This a very important part of website speed. Many people will spend a lot of time trying to compress images on their own as a result spending hours that you could be working on more important tasks. We are here to tell you to stop wasting your time! In the last couple of years developers have been working on plugins that will resize the images for you as well as will not take the quality from it.
Plugins
Most of the plugins that can help with images are free up to a certain amount of images. Some web hosting companies will offer a free plugin and CDN for images. Siteground has SG Optimizer for images.
